


as we huddle together

by Anonymous



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Best Friends, Childhood Friends, Holding Hands, M/M, Pre-Canon, Rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 06:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9871106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Hajime would later, much later, compare Oikawa Tooru to a storm.





	

Hajime would later, much later, compare Oikawa Tooru to a storm.

For now, though, he is five years old and the timeless sky is pouring down on the world—Sendai, Miyagi, to Hajime's child-sized grasp on things like _worlds_ —and here is home. Here, it is warmth.

Lying on his stomach, feet kicking up high as they can go under the kotatsu, Hajime tucks his chin in the crook of a folded arm and opens _Mushi-sha’s Handbook Series of Insects: Series Five_ to a page where he left off yesterday. He skims his fingertips across words and pictures in search for _that last part_. (“No dog-ears or highlighter, dear,” his mother says. “That's a very precious book.”) It feels smooth, plastic-y, like those old photos Hajime sometimes slides out of their dusty family album just to trace the pads of his fingers over, wanting to sense more of this world around him by touch, of things more than what the eyes can see.

Shapes and colors of arctiid moths fill his view, all laid upon this pristine white background. He taps his toe against the wooden flooring to a song’s beat as he tracks subtle differences in each pair of patterned wings, trying to pick up the tune his mother is humming. She sits beside him, flipping through a magazine with vibrant orange-reds of momiji trees and napping lions and colorful hummingbirds on its cover.

A flash of lightning streaks through the blinds; Hajime counts down, shifts a tad closer to his mother, and feels her hand card through his hair as a crack of thunder follows the call. For the tiniest flinch he couldn't hold in, he’s learned to tell himself that it is better than yesterday, anyway, and makes a promise of _next time_ to the storm raging outside.

It howls and wanes, surges and trickles, a force not sure what to make of itself. Hajime considers padding up to the window, tug the covers aside, and see if the rain hurtling toward the glass would look like a translucent meteor shower right here within his reach. _Dewdrops from the sky_. Hajime thinks, somewhat randomly, of those wispy droplets that cling onto grass and leaves and flower petals, a force of their own in pulling against the billowing wind to settle and veil things in gossamer, if ever transient in their stay, breezing through the atmosphere to someplace new every day.

When the wind tones down, it's clear that the persistent _thud thud thud_ isn't a too long branch of some tree poking at the house but rapid knocks on their door, instead.

“Ah.” His mother frowns a little. “Wonder who could that be, in a storm like this,” she muses, getting up to her feet and walking to the front door. Hajime finds the red and black of _Tyria jacobaeae_ similar to a yukata she wore for a festival some months ago.

He knows of a door opened by the pitter-patter of downpour that comes barreling in, thrumming unhindered. _“My son is missing!”_ a stranger yells through the deluge. Another boom, this time more of a rumble and tumble sort, the steaming tea-filled cups on the kotatsu rattling in return, and Hajime thinks _how strange_ that the sky could’ve shaken the ground so much.

* * *

Hajime finds him huddling under a zelkova tree in the middle of a nearby park. Raising his voice over the torrent, he points out, with little prelude, “Your mom is looking for you again.”

Oikawa whips his head around at that. Curled up with his knees drawn to his chest, tucked into a niche in the tree, he looks even smaller than he already is, a mirror-image of the boy from three years ago taking shelter in the overcast of cloudburst. It was a different park and he’d been under a blooming rhododendron tree—lured in by the pretty blossoms, he later confessed—but the same rainy weather; he always picks the worst time to run away, that dumbass. Hajime isn't the tallest of the bunch—one of his prayers to the gods is to combat this, though he also does his homework and chases a dose of sunlight in the mornings—but right now, standing in his muddy shoes that may as well be unsalvageable, soaked to the bones and tiny shivers rocking his frame, it's still as if he towers over the other boy.

A scrunched up face plunges slack when he spots Hajime around the bend of the trunk, maybe from surprise at being discovered quite so soon. Faster than ever, if Hajime says so to himself. What, did he expect Hajime to _not_ remember all his (and by extension theirs) hidey-holes by now?

Oikawa hurries to wipe at the tear stains with the back of his hand even though rainfall washes away most of the evidence. He glares at Hajime, puffy eyes red as his snot-stuffed nose, gaze hardened as it can be coming from a sniffling eight-year-old blotchy in the face.

“You found me again,” he says, and gives up a clogged chuckle. Hajime _really will_ hit him if that dumbass lets himself catch a cold again. “What are you doing here?” Oikawa asks, already familiar with how _go away_ wouldn't do much to Hajime once he's on a mission.

Finding and bringing someone home, in this case.

(This, too, would become a trend.

—and maybe that particular someone has some irredeemable tendency to latch on and stick around a certain best friend.

—maybe Hajime isn't much different, in that regard.)

With a sigh of the foggiest sort, the vivid cloud of his breath rivaling those in winter chill, Hajime closes up his umbrella (deployed too late, anyway) and allows the rain to shower him straight on. If he were a bit more grown-up perhaps he’d have better common sense, but as of now, annoying and insufferable as his best friend is, Hajime thinks Oikawa shouldn't be out in the rain and sopping wet all alone, and so he flops down to sit next to him. In closing the distance between them for good, Oikawa leans into his side, cold skin hopefully to warm up with the contact, and lays his head in the crook of Hajime's neck.

They’ll both get some heavy scolding for their ruined clothes, in addition to a sure chance of getting sick sometime this week, but—together, he can at least let Oikawa hold his hand through the worst of it. Oikawa is not tactile, shies away from people's touches most of the time, slips away whenever he can; there's just something, though, about having a hand to hold, and Oikawa never does let go when it is Hajime's hand in his.

Hajime doesn't need to take him back home, anyway. At eight, he comes to a rather natural conclusion: that if _Tooru_ feels like home to Hajime, then surely Hajime would be the same for him. With this in mind, he feels for a hand colder than his own from its time out in the downpour, finds it already wrinkling the hem of his shirt, and takes it in his grasp, because there's really no need for a reason to hold hands in the rain.

Oikawa tightens his grip, lithe fingers wrapping around Hajime's, and presses the curve of a smile onto his shoulder.

Here is home. Here, it is warmth, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was written in a day and I couldn't muster the energy to make it longer - sorry if it seems messy ^^' I really want to finish my other WIPs but that one-shot I mentioned has a deadline (and may be longer than first expected). It's just a lot of anxiety, especially because it also needs research and I am bad at that. I'm taking little breaks by writing short fics like this, even if it's challenging all the same.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think? :3
> 
> [tumblr.](http://astersandstuffs.tumblr.com/)


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